The Catalan technological ecosystem receives its accolades at the 19th edition of the EmprènXXI awards, the accolades from CaixaBank DayOne and the state entrepreneurship financing company Enisa dedicated to the best emerging companies. The entity's entrepreneurship financing segment has awarded the start-ups Second Hundred, Aridditive, and AtomH2 in three of its eight sectoral challenges of the year, while it has granted the biomedical company Polar Nanopharma one of the two honorable mentions, dedicated to the initiative with the greatest capacity for social impact. The four companies from the principality have prevailed in a process that received more than a thousand applications.

Almost a decade after closing the shop she had in Sant Andreu, Barcelona, Pilar still frequently meets neighbors in the neighborhood who stop her to remind her, gratefully, that they have half their house set up by her. “It was the family business, of electricity and spare parts, which I gradually transformed into decoration,” explains this lively 70-year-old woman.

“I have lived forty years interpreting a script that was not mine.” This is how the writer and communicator summarizes In Catalonia, reality is measured in an abysmal diagnostic gap. According to the reference work in our country, done by a team of researchers from the Global Health Institute (ISGlobal) of Barcelona and the Mútua Terrassa University Hospital, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder in minors stands at 1.23%. The distortion, however, explodes when crossing data by gender: while almost 2% of boys (1.95%) have a diagnosis, the percentage drops to 0.46% in girls. This ratio of 4.5 boys for every girl is not a faithful reflection of the disorder's biology, but proof of a historical clinical blindness that has left thousands of women on the margins.

With the ELA law (for the acronyms of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), the Spanish government created the dependency degree III+ of extreme dependence that was to guarantee the right of those affected by this incurable neurodegenerative disease to receive a specialized service 24 hours a day and a benefit of up to 9,850 euros per month to cover the expenses of professional caregivers. Half a year later, as reported by El País, the National Confederation of ELA Entities (ConELA) has denounced that there are five communities that apply or want to implement a "co-payment" –which implies a reduction in the benefit that reaches families– and demand that they do not do so because they break "the spirit" of the norm.

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About 1,700 people are confined on board a cruise ship in Bordeaux, France, following the death of a 90-year-old passenger and the appearance of dozens of cases of acute gastroenteritis, according to French health sources. Pending test results, a possible food poisoning is being investigated.

A gastroenteritis outbreak on a cruise ship has caused the death of a 90-year-old man and forced the confinement of 1,700 passengers in Bordeaux until the cause of the contagion was clarified, as dozens of cases of acute illness have appeared. This Wednesday afternoon, French health authorities confirmed that it was gastroenteritis and lifted the confinement of asymptomatic individuals, who were able to disembark.

Catalonia is one of the territories with the most clinical trials active in the world. In 2025 it participated in 5,768 studies, which catapulted it to seventh place in the world ranking, according to the BioRegion of Catalonia Report. The United States, with 38,218 trials underway, and China, with 17,321, led the list of countries.

Asistencia Sanitaria has its own healthcare model, founded, managed, and directed by doctors. With medicine at its core, it offers the highest quality, personalized, and socially responsible care. True to its founding values, doctors and users lead a unique cooperative healthcare model where medical judgment prevails over any other interest.

This Sunday was the time to test the efforts of the past week to prepare the evacuation of the passengers trapped on the MSHondius and coordinate their return home with an operation that would guarantee health and safety at all times. The cruise ship arrived at dawn off the Canary coast, and the ship's lights were visible from the port of Granadilla before sunrise. At that moment there were 147 people on board, and during the day 94 have disembarked. Some passengers will still spend one more night on board awaiting the last repatriation flights, which will be completed this Monday for 24 more passengers to return to their countries. After these last departures, only 30 crew members will remain on the cruise ship, who will be in charge of taking it to the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where the disinfection of the ship will be finalized.

The complex operation that this Sunday must evacuate the passengers and part of the crew of the MVHondius has involved great diplomatic efforts to coordinate the actions of the different countries, but also to allay the fear of hantavirus and the reluctance for the cruise ship to approach the Canary coast. Concerns that have also served to fuel political attacks. The outbreak totals six positive cases – including the three fatalities – so the ship will arrive in port without any new infections having been confirmed.

Almost the only unknown that remains to be known about the arrival operation of the luxury cruise ship MVHondius on the island of Tenerife is the time it will drop anchor to remain anchored until the Spanish authorities order the disembarkation. The good sea conditions have meant that the ship is making good progress and this Friday it was said that the vessel would arrive on Saturday afternoon and not Sunday morning, as had been planned. Despite this advancement, the night will be allowed to pass before the machinery is started to disembark the 151 people on board, counting 147 passengers and crew and four professionals who boarded in Cape Verde to assist them. For the moment, the toll of the outbreak remains at five confirmed infections, in addition to the three who have died, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is confident that no more passengers will test positive.

The cruise ship affected by hantavirus will disembark from here in three or four days in Granadilla de Abona, a secondary port in the southeast of the Canary island of Tenerife, very close to the airport. Here it is expected that all passengers and crew can be evaluated by medical teams, but they will not be able to disembark from the ship. From next Monday they will be repatriated to their countries of origin if they do not present any symptoms compatible with the infection. In the case of the 14 people of Spanish nationality who are on board —including five Catalans—, they will be transferred by an army plane to the Torrejón de Ardoz base, in Madrid, to be admitted to the Gómez Ulloa military hospital, where they will spend their quarantine. The authorities have not yet determined for how long, but they do know that the incubation period for hantavirus is about 45 days. The ship set sail on Wednesday afternoon and Health estimates it will take three days and 12 hours to dock in the Canary Islands if there are no unforeseen events.

There is an idea that is often repeated in many homes: when grandchildren arrive, grandparents light up and the house fills with laughter. And also, as has just been shown, with health. The latter is not just a romantic metaphor about family affection, which is also very important for individual well-being, but a scientific hypothesis that has just received solid empirical support. Older adults who help care for their grandchildren have better cognitive function and less mental deterioration over time. This is the conclusion of a study published inPsychology and Aging by behavioral science specialist Yvonne Brehmer and her collaborators from various universities and research centers in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden.To reach this conclusion, they have analyzed data from almost 3,000 grandparents participating in the so-called Longitudinal Study on Aging, conducted in England. These researchers have taken advantage of the surveys and cognitive tests carried out between 2017 and 2022 on people over 50 years old participating in the aforementioned aging study. What they discovered is surprising. Those grandparents who, at some point in the previous year, had played with their grandchildren, done leisure activities with them, helped with homework, or with any other daily task, obtained higher scores in memory and verbal fluency tests than those who had not. A difference that is maintained even after adjusting personal data based on factors such as age or general health status, which further reinforces the idea that it is not just that the "healthiest" people are the ones who look after their grandchildren, but that looking after them favors their health.

Today the day breathes the happiness of a festival, of a festival that has a unique particularity: it is simultaneously a national festival and a universal festival. And, frankly, as the world is (and with the busy day that awaits us), with this we would have enough to analyze this April 23rd, which today could have a very simple title: Long live Saint George.But current events are what they are, imperative and capricious, to the point that today it brings us the other side of life. If Sant Jordi is the perfume of a rose and the smell of a new book, the pact between the PP and Vox in Aragon is as if it rained shit and the air had been smeared with the stench of rot.The PP and Vox have agreed in Aragon to demand "freeing Aragon from the imposition of Catalan" to invest Jorge Azcón, from the PP, as president. Yes, as it sounds: "Freeing Aragon from Catalan." There is a section of the agreement titled "Freedom in the face of indoctrination and imposition." The law stating that Aragonese Catalan is a co-official language is being reformed, and the Aragonese Institute of Catalan, which oversees the application of Catalan norms and the social use of the language, is being abolished. Let's see, the PP already invented the name LAPAO to avoid saying Catalan, but now they are not hiding anything and are talking about "freeing Aragon from Catalan," as if one were talking about freeing it from a foreign invasion or a disease, as if it were not the language spoken and that has been spoken for centuries by the Aragonese who live in La Franja.  

One of the promises of the Human Genome Project –which was published 25 years ago this year– was that our genome would allow us to predict what we are like and what we will get sick from. The predictions of the 1990s, when the project began, were very optimistic and perhaps to some extent naive, because genetic information is not linear or simple, but complex, with many levels of regulation and interaction. Furthermore, environmental factors must also be taken into account, including diet, exercise, stress, and also, very importantly, the history of diseases and infections throughout life, which impacts our long-term health.

They had 2,400 followers on Instagram, from where they offered for the same price a shot of botox and another of hyaluronic acid in the lips so that they would look plumper. The account published offers and saving bundles, and there were plenty of responses and comments from clients apparently satisfied with the aesthetic treatments received. But it was all a deception. The clinic was not a usual premises, but an apartment, and it was not advertised on the street as a medical center. Inside, hanging on the walls, were several diplomas, all fake. The botox they injected had no medical guarantee, and the person administering it had no medical training.

Artificial intelligence is already part of the daily life of primary care in Catalonia. In fact, ChatGPT is the most used tool by family doctors, far ahead of other options, according to a study published in The Lancet Primary Care. The work, promoted by the Societat Catalana de Medicina Familiar i Comunitària (CAMFiC) and led by Antoni Sisó, shows that AI has become a regular support in tasks such as medical literature research, text drafting, or clinical session preparation.

U-turn by the Department of Health. The Conselleria will next week withdraw the pilot program that provided incentives for primary care centers (CAPs) to ensure that sick leaves for mental health and musculoskeletal injuries are not excessively prolonged. Two months ago, Health had begun informing CAPs that they would receive more budget if they avoided absences without a diagnosis and delays in the appointments needed to assess a person who is on sick leave and, if they have already recovered, to discharge them.

Nevin Cohen (Brooklyn, New York, 1962) is an expert in public food policies and director of the Urban Food Policy Institute – belonging to the City University of New York – and advocates for actions that can lead to more egalitarian, sustainable, and healthy food. He visits Barcelona to participate in the first international congress of the FARO observatory on the future of food, held at the University of Barcelona, where he is amazed by its historic building. “How beautiful it is to study here,” he says, taking a photo of the cloister.